Xuenou > Movies > Sherlock: How The Cabbie Killed So Many People
Sherlock: How The Cabbie Killed So Many People
Sherlock's premiere episode introduced a cabbie who was a serial killer, but the show failed to explain how he managed to kill so many people.

Sherlock: How The Cabbie Killed So Many People

The first episode of the BBC’s Sherlock allowed the title character to show off his unbelievable deduction skills, but a big question remains about that specific case: how did the cabbie know what their victims would pick, thus killing so many people? Sherlock Holmes is one of the most popular literary characters, and as such, he and his stories have been adapted to all types of media for decades, though not all of them have been loyal to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works.

Many artists and creators have taken a lot of creative liberties when adapting Sherlock Holmes to other media, and one of the most recent and successful examples of this is the BBC’s Sherlock. Created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, Sherlock brought the Great Detective and company to modern-day London, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson, Sherlock’s loyal friend and partner. Sherlock’s episodes were based on Conan Doyle’s stories, beginning with “A Study in Pink”, based on the short story A Story in Scarlet, which introduced the audience to the detective and his many skills but left a big question about the villain.

“A Study Pink” followed Sherlock and John on their first case together, in which they investigated a series of murders initially believed to be suicides. Sherlock found out that these were not suicides, and by the end of the episode, he met the man behind it all: Jeff Hope, a cabbie who liked to play a game with his victims. This consisted of him pulling out two bottles containing identical pills – one is harmless, the other is poison – and inviting his victims to choose one, promising he would take the other. However, the cabbie was killed before he could reveal more about his methods, leaving the audience wondering how he succeeded in killing so many people, but it could be all about the cabbie’s manipulation and observation skills, which would have also made him an interesting rival.

It has been theorized that, if the cabbie’s victims chose randomly as he claimed, he would have had very little chance of surviving (to kill four people, it would have been around 12%). The cabbie’s reasons to do what he did were that he was (supposedly) terminally ill and wanted to leave enough money for his family, admitting that he had a “sponsor” (none other than Jim Moriarty), who paid him for each murder. With that in mind, it’s unlikely the cabbie would have left it all to chance and good luck, so the most reasonable explanation for how the cabbie killed so many people in Sherlock is that he was very skilled in manipulating and reading people. He could have targeted people he sensed to be weak and easy to manipulate, and when it was time to pick a pill, he gave them the freedom of choosing, but only if they chose the poisoned pill. If they picked the harmless one, he would have tricked them to change their mind.

If the cabbie in Sherlock’s “A Study in Pink” was that skilled in manipulating and analyzing people, he could have been a great rival to Sherlock Holmes, but unfortunately for the audience and luckily for Sherlock, John Watson killed him before his tricks could be deduced or revealed. The fate of the cabbie and the lack of an explanation of how he committed his crimes are one of Sherlock’s many disappointments, but not as big as to taint the rest of the episode or the season, which is regarded as one of the strongest ones.